Microsoft Accounts Receive New Security Features

After finally adding two factor authentication to Microsoft accounts back in April, the company today announced that over the next couple of days it is going to add additional security features to accounts that are designed to give users more control and visibility of their Microsoft accounts. One of the features being added is the ability to see recent activity. Users will now be able to see recent sign-ins as well as other account activity, such as recent password changes. The recent activity screen will display information such as successful and unsuccessful sign-in attempts, addition and deletion of security information and more. For each type of activity, a Bing map will be shown that will reveal the location from where the request came from as well as what device and browser was used to make the request.

The recovery codes feature is basically a fail-safe designed to safeguard users in the rare event that they lose security information provided as part of two factor authentication. It usually includes phone number and email address, and if for some reason the user loses access to both of them, recovery code has been designed to regain access to the Microsoft account. Users can only add one recovery code per account, adding a new one will cancel the previous one. Last but not the least, Microsoft accounts now provide more control over security notifications. Users now have the ability to choose where they would like to receive them, such as password reset notifications. As previously mentioned, these new security features will be rolled out for all Microsoft account users over the next few days.